Adobe announced overnight a major shift in direction for their mobile division.
Danny Winokur, Vice President & General Manager, Interactive Development at Adobe says:
Over the past two years, we’ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices.
However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.
I find the timing of this change to be quite puzzling. Our mobile devices are now more powerful than ever, with dual core processors. This change seems more like a cost cutting method, rather than one built on solid technical grounds.
Given that there’s not a 1 to 1 replacement of features from Flash Mobile to HTML5, the decision is bizarre. While the majority of mobile Flash Player usage may have been as a video wrapper, which is solved by HTML5’s <video> tag, there’s a lot that isn’t. Developers will now need to develop Adobe AIR or compile to native apps for each platform. It seems premature in my mind, what do you think ?
The comments on the post have now been closed, it seems this decision is fairly controversial.
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